Texas wind generation keeps growing, state remains at No. 1

1of3Giant wind turbine blades are offloaded from a freighter Friday January 20, 2017 at the Port of Corpus Christi. Parts for wind turbines that are being erected in the United States come from countries across the globe such as Spain and Brazil. These blades are 63 meters long and are made of carbon fiber. The Port of Corpus Christi started receiving wind energy cargo in 2006.Photo: John Davenport, Staff / San Antonio Express-News

2of3Cattle roam on a mesa near Iraan, Texas on the site of the Desert Sky Wind Farm. According to website Desert Sky Wind Farm® is a 160.5-megawatt (160,500-kilowatt) wind power generation facility located near the far West Texas town of Iraan, in Pecos County. The site includes 107 turbines, each rated at 1.5 megawatts (1,500 kilowatts) spread over a 15-square-mile area on Indian Mesa.Photo: John Davenport, Staff / San Antonio Express-News

3of3Desert Sky Wind Farm turbines twirl near Iraan, Texas. Access to transmission has been key to growth of wind power in Texas.Photo: John Davenport, Staff / San Antonio Express-News

Texas continues to dominate the nation’s wind energy production, adding far more generating capacity than any other state last year and having more installed wind power capacity than all but five countries in the world, the U.S. Energy Department reported Thursday.

While best known for its oil and gas industry, the state has vaulted to the top of wind power by not only exploiting the strong winds of West Texas, but also by building the transmission to move the electricity from remote regions to the state’s population areas, analysts said. The state’s wind energy production, meanwhile, is only expected to increase and provide a growing share of the state’s electricity as advancing technology allows turbines to generate at lower wind speeds and improved weather forecasting makes it easier to integrate it into the grid.

“The average capacity factor for new wind installations has risen above 40 percent,” said Alex Fitzsimmons, chief of staff of the Energy Department’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. “They’re getting more output. They’re doing a better job of converting the wind into usable energy, so that improves the economics as well.”

Texas added more than 2,300 megawatts of wind power last year, nearly three times the amount added by the next closest state, Oklahoma, which increased its wind generating capacity by about 850 megawatts.

At the end of 2017, Texas had more than 22,000 megawatts of wind power, more than triple Oklahoma’s 7,500 megawatts of wind generating capacity, the second highest in the nation.

A megawatt can power roughly 200 homes during periods of peak demand.

Analysts attribute much of the state’s success to decisions in the mid 2000s to build transmission lines from wind energy production areas in West Texas and the Panhandle to population centers farther east. The $7 billion investment built lines with the capacity to move 18,500 megawatts of power to wholesale power markets, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which operates the state’s power grid.

Andy Swift, a professor and associate director at the National Wind Institute at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, likened the transmission lines to the farm-to-market roads that crisscross the state and originally were built to help farmers get produce from the fields to nearby towns and beyond. The transmission lines made it economically attractive to build projects to tap the vast wind resource in West Texas and the Panhandle, which account for most of the state’s wind generating capacity.

“It was an ‘if you build it, they will come’ idea,” said Joshua Rhodes, a research associate at the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. “And they sure came.”

As wind technology has advanced, the cost of electricity generated by wind turbines has fallen by about one-third since 2010, according to the Energy Department. In Texas, the growth in wind energy has come as coal-fired power plants have shut down, unable to compete with lower-cost wind farms and natural gas plants. Wind surpassed coal in generating capacity last year, according to ERCOT.

In 2017, wind generated about 15 percent of the electricity in Texas, up from less than 13 percent in 2016, according to the Energy Department. In the United States overall, wind made up 6.3 percent of electricity generation.

Perhaps the greatest hurdle to wind and other renewable energy sources playing a bigger role in the power mix is they are intermittent, creating a challenge to integrate them into the grid. ERCOT, which manages 90 percent of the state’s power load for some 24 million customers, is improving its weather forecasting to get the most out of wind power. ERCOT has hired two firms that provide forecasts at five minute intervals to allow the grid operator to better to better predict wind production and adjust accordingly, said Dan Woodfin, the senior manager of system operations.

After Texas and Oklahoma, the states with the most wind generating capacity are Iowa with 7,308 megawatts and California with 5,555 megawatts, according to the Energy Department. Only China, the United States, Germany, India and Spain have more wind power capacity than Texas.